John Dos Passos

John Dos Passos was born in Chicago in 1896. His father was the son of a Portuguese immigrant and earned a comfortable living as a lawyer. The Dos Passos family was well traveled, and by the time Dos Passos entered Harvard he had lived in Belgium, England, Mexico, and Washington, D.C.

After his graduation form Harvard in 1916 he went to Spain, hoping to study architecture. But the outbreak of the First World War altered his plans. He served as an ambulance driver for the French and later drew on his war experiences in two of his early novels - the unremarkable One Man's Initiation (1917) and the more successful Three Soldiers (1922). Like Faulkner's Soldier's Pay, Hasek's Good Soldier Svejk, and Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, Dos Passos' early novels attacked the myth of the "Great War."

Disillusioned by the war, Dos Passos became a dedicated leftist. He is often included among those who founded the so-called "proletarian literature" movement of the 1930s. During the 1920s he was a political activist, and was imprisoned briefly for his part in a demonstration in support of Sacco and Vanzetti.

With the publication of Manhattan Transfer in 1925, Dos Passos introduced the literary techniques for which he is best known. The novel was a kaleidoscopic view of New York, encompassing many characters and employing the artifacts of popular culture - newspaper articles, radio shows, songs, and movies - to provide an incredibly rich portrayal of time and place. These techniques were known as the "camera eye," "newsreel," and "four-eyed vision." While some critics found them to be tiresome in Dos Passos' later works, in 1925 they were original and stunningly effective.

The painstaking attention to detail that Dos Passos invested in his novels took his work beyond fiction and into the realm of history and sociology. Because he had been raised away from his native land, he could view his country with the fascination of a visitor. This removal contributed to the acute powers of observation that earned him the title "anatomist of our time" from Bernard DeVoto in 1936.

Dos Passos continued to write prolifically until his death in 1970, producing a number of "documentary" novels, some unconventional travelogues, and even some historical studies. For years he did not enjoy the critical esteem accorded his contemporaries Hemingway and Faulkner. Today, however, critics are reevaluating his work, particularly Manhattan Transfer and the USA Trilogy, and finding them major works of fiction and important time capsules of a critical period in U.S. history.